The Immortal: The Walking Stick
by AlcatrazOutpatient
Summary: Spin-off of The Others Series. It is a stick that decides her direction after his death. But she will swear to the ends of the earth in later years that the gods controlled how that stick landed. Slight spoilers to the Others Series


**The Immortal: The Walking Stick**

**Disclaimer:** Yu-gi-oh! Duel Monsters is owned by Kazuki Takahashi, Studio Gallop, Nihon Ad Systems, and TV Tokyo. All names were changed to the characters of this fandom in order to protect the real people involved in the following incidents.

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><p><em>"Immortality - a fate worse than death."<em>_  
><em>_- Edgar A. Shoaff_

It is a stick that decides her direction after his death.

With Tikal still burning and the blood of the monster she set out to kill that day still on her hands, Atem pulls herself away from the corpse of the only man she has and will ever love and sharpens a stick. She can't even bury him - she doesn't have the resources and Atem doubts that the gods will listen to her prayers after everything she's done - simply throws the stick in the air and begins walking in the direction it is pointing to.

She tries not to think about everything she's left behind. Atem doesn't want to think about her father, who bled out on his thrown, refusing to leave his post as king to the bitter end. She doesn't want to think about Dartz. Or rather, what's left of Dartz. His body wasn't much more than a lump of flesh by the time she was done with him.

Ancient Killer is a title that she can add on to the few that she has collected. Not that she wants to be remembered as such.

But the stick thankfully points away from Tikal, away from the city she had grown up in. So she begins to walk.

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><p>She will swear to the ends of the earth in later years that the gods - magic - controlled how that stick landed. Had it pointed in any other direction, she would have been unable to begin her chase.<p>

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><p>There are times when Atem burns.<p>

It feels like red hot fire that is scorching her insides and she smells the putrid scent of roses all around her body. It makes her scream and shout until her voice is raw and she vomits up everything that was in her stomach.

And she craves _it_ the entire time. The _thing_ that made it possible for her to become a True Necromancer, even for a moment. It had been worth it, in the end, to see his eyes open once more after death, to see him breathe even if only for a few more seconds. Even though she was cursed now and her magic was going every which way except the way she wanted it to, Atem knew it was worth it.

She doesn't understand why Bakura wasn't angry at her, why he didn't blame her for what she did to him. His final words, ones that he hadn't got the chance to say before his first death, only expressed his own love for her. Not hatred - "I'm dead because of you" - nor despair - "I lost everything because of your selfishness" - but love.

She can't understand him sometimes, even after all these years.

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><p>The Lines would have killed Bakura in the end.<p>

Atem rationalizes it to herself as she continued to follow the path of her sharpened sticks. She continues to make them as she travels, stopping every so often in a village and staying until she goes tired or bored of the questions as to where she came from.

But the Lines would have killed him because that was what they were designed to do. They were the punishment that mortals cast upon certain kinds of killers in order to ensure their timely demise. They would have marked him, shown Bakura for what he truly was, and then torn at his soul until there was nothing left of him.

They would have killed him in the end. It was only because of that woman that Bakura hadn't suffered. Atem hates Iona for taking him away from her, hates her like she hates the rest of the Ancients. But secretly, some part of her thanks the Queen of Mu for making sure that Bakura died instantly from the wounds she inflicted on him.

After all, no one can survive a knife to the heart. Right?

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><p>The land where the stick points her to is cold. So cold that the water becomes solid and the rain falls as white bits of fluff. Atem doesn't understand how that's possible, but she realizes that the world is far more amazing than what she once thought it was.<p>

But the cold stings her feet, squishing between her toes like mud. She tries to run into the cover of a tree, but all the leaves have fallen from the branches. Atem is so confused. What is wrong with this world? The sticks have pointed her in the direction of a white, burning cold land and she doesn't know what to do.

She runs. Normally she walks but now she runs. Running and attempting to warm her body with the spell that Amneal had taught her - no, don't think about him. Don't think about how he had withered and died, the first time Atem had seen a man as old has he had pass away. It was alarming how the breath seemed to leave his body and simply stay that way.

But she keeps running because the sticks are all pointing in this direction. The gods are shouting in her ears again. **Run. Run faster. Faster! Run or you will miss it!**

Atem collapses and the world goes black. She wakes up warm, wrapped in blankets. Something clinks beside her and then there are voices. She focuses magic in her ears, trying to understand the language.

"...crazy. You're crazy, bringing a body back and treating it like it's alive. The girl is dead!"

"She is alive, I swear it," her heart nearly stopped. That voice sounded exactly like...but that was impossible. Bakura was dead.

She hears the gods shouting in her ear again, telling her of just who and what was on the other side of her closed eyes. Atem sits up straight, shocking the two boys into shrieking. She ignores the other child and focuses on him.

Bakura looks like he did only a few years after she had bought him, but not at the same time. His eyes are wide and his hair is limp. He is small and slight, but she doesn't care because he has come back to her.

Atem breathes his name, tears of joy in her eyes and leaps towards him, kissing him full on the lips. It has been so long since she had tasted him and she loves him so much and -

He stiffens, screams and runs out of the tent, shouting something about being eaten. The other boy looks at her, "How do you know his name?"

The tears become sad and Atem dies a little bit inside.

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><p>Thief King is dead. She had four years with him; four wonderful, heart wrenching years. Atem mourns him in a way that she never thought possible.<p>

She pushes his body into the ocean, wondering why it had not disappeared, before picking up his spear and throwing it in the air. It points one way, but this time Atem picks it up, stores it in the Realm, and walks.

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><p>She walks for years. Decades. Centuries. She raises a baby girl as her own. She names her Sedina, after Thief King's goddess of the ocean. Atem tells her that Bakura was her father, lies through her teeth so that she can feel like a mother even though her womb is empty and no child will ever be genuinely called her's.<p>

Sedina had been abandoned in the snow by her parents. She loved raising the girl. She cried when she died.

The boat that they were in capsized and her little girl drowned. Atem wonders if she could have saved her. Somewhere in her heart, she knows that she couldn't, but it's a very small part that is overwhelmed by the guilt and the knowledge that she would have been a terrible mother.

And it haunts her how Sedina's body sinking mirrored Thief King's corpse almost exactly.

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><p>Bakura Touzoku is married. Married with kids. Atem loves kids, but she's hesitant around his simply because they belong to that other woman. She is incredibly jealous, but tries on to show it.<p>

Instead she focuses all of her attention on him. Because she knows how arranged marriages work and she can spot an unhappy one a thousand leagues away. Rica-san can't use magic and it therefore terrified of her husband. Bakura is bored by her. She is nothing to him, just a woman that his parents decided that he should marry.

Atem doesn't exactly like Rica-san, but doesn't blame her for anything. She remembers what Dartz had been like. But Rica-san is shy and soft-spoken and she won't raise a finger when Bakura takes an interest in her. She seduces that girl's husband away from her because she's jealous and wants him all to herself and she wishes that she would feel a bit guilty about it.

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><p>Touzoku dies as well. An arrow in the back. The man who shot it didn't live for much longer afterwards. She made sure of that.<p>

His body doesn't dissolve either. Like Thief King, it stayed because the Realm didn't want it. She wonders why. She drags it all the way back to his home, to his wife and children for a proper burial. Rica-san doesn't cry; she's never been close to her husband. The woman does take his armor, but tells Atem to keep his katana.

She lets his sword lead her, as Thief King's had, for the next two hundred years.

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><p>Atem doesn't understand Christianity. Or Judaism. Or Islam. Or any of these strange single-god religions.<p>

It's not that their principles are odd. It's that she can't understand how one god could take care of everything. How could a single entity look after the rain and the wind, the sun and the moon? How could one god be looking at living and take care of the departed souls that Necromancers help to pass on?

And even then, she wonders as she see the battles between the warring factions of the Crusades. She doesn't understand how people descended from a common ancestor could be fighting over a city that belonged to their god. From what she understands, Jews and Christians and Muslims were the children of Abraham, and children shouldn't fight with each other.

These new lands are very strange. Atem discovers that the drink these people have is practically toxic to her. She doesn't like alcohol, especially the vodka that the Russians get her to try. It is the closest she's come to dying outside of a combat zone in centuries.

It hits her then that she's starting to refer to amounts of time in blocks of hundreds of years. It makes her stop in her tracks and she spends a good five minutes contemplating that fact.

When she finally excepts the fact that she is older than any other human being, Atem draws Touzoku's sword from the Realm and throws the scabbard in the air. It points in the direction that she was already traveling in. She continues to walk.

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><p>Morgana is a beautiful little girl. Atem snatches her away from her life on the streets, one that would have lead her to a life of misery and shame in the whore houses of land of Briton. She is old enough to know that Atem is not her true mother, but young enough that she still needs someone to take care of her. And take care of her she does.<p>

Morgana is a Shape Shifter. That nearly sends Atem into a panic when she discovers this fact. She remembers _that_ Shape Shifter from the time before her curse; _that_ Shape Shifter who had made Bakura say the things he had and make her challenge everything that she had stood for. But she tries not to let that influence her as she raises Morgana into a respectable young woman.

The Black Death strikes the Isles hard and fast, killing people by the cartloads as it swept through the towns. Only Morgana could figure out that it was not a natural disease, being the Master Healer that she was. Atem taught her everything Touzoku had known about that branch of magic; everything that wonderful man had passed to her went to that girl. Morgana decided to do something.

But she couldn't. Morgana gets pregnant via a boy she meets in a small town. She gifts Atem with her first grandchild, though it costs her life to do it. Mordred is not magical like his mother, but he is just a determined as Morgana to find and destroy the man who started it all.

When he is old enough and strong enough, Mordred finds and fights the Death Touch who started the Plague. He tells his ageless grandmother to stay on the sidelines and not interfere as he leaps into battle against Arthur Pendragon, the worst serial killer in all of history. Both of them die.

Atem stands solemn and sad, but doesn't turn her head from the scene until her eyes droop and her knees collapse. When she wakes up, she buries her grandchild and walks away.

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><p>The third Bakura is the first of the reincarnations that Atem truly loves. While she avoided Thief King and practically stalked Touzoku, she loves Bakura the Game Master for who he is.<p>

She finds him in a tavern of all places, looking for someone to point him towards a servant who is good with horses. The irony is not lost on her when Bakura chooses her. It is even more humourous when she discovers that he thinks she is a man.

Atem lets him believe it for as long as he wants to. He finally snaps and calls her on it three weeks into their trip. She tells him that she's known about him peeking on her while she bathes. He looses his stern composure for a moment and blushes. She sees what's underneath and her heart warms for the first time in years.

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><p>When Game Master dies – she can still hear the sickening squelch as metal sword passed through flesh and blood and bone – she flies into a blind rage. She doesn't remember what happened or what she did, but when she comes back to reality the world is on fire.<p>

She hasn't done something like that since Bakura – the first one, her secret lover – died. But then again, the world was already on fire, so there wasn't much to add to.

But it burns with her rage and it burns with her power. And Atem lets the fires follow her all the way to the estate his family owns. They did this. And they burn with the world.

The entire line is eliminated. The men and the women. The sons and the daughters. Even the infants in their cribs. No one survives.

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><p>Atem stays to behind and finishes what Game Master started. She follows her enemy with his broad sword down into the south, learning to sail from seasoned captions and working her hands to the bone.<p>

When she finally reaches the shores of Africa, she adopts a boy named Aladdin into her family. To her utter despair, he is a Creator like Dartz. Once again, she tries not to let it influence her too much, but it is much more difficult when he starts to make roses.

She hates roses. They remind her of him, of those things.

Aladdin is her first child with a happy ending. He leaves her, like any child should, and marries a lesser daughter of the Chinese Emperor. He gives her grandchildren and those children, after his passing, give her great grandchildren. And it continues on and on and on.

Atem wonders if maybe she would have been a good mother after all.

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><p>She meets the fourth Bakura completely by accident. She is walking down the streets of Cairo, trying to avoid any connection to the Ancient's old colony that existed here, when she simply bumps into him. When she turns to apologize, Atem recognizes white hair just before it slips away into the crowd.<p>

But she knows the feel of his magic like she knows the back of her hand. The idea of seeing Bakura and Thief King and Touzoku and Game Master again spurs her on and Atem races towards the city square. She finds him there, sitting against a wall, surrounded by children and telling them stories.

It pains her so much to see him like that. But she can imagine anyways.

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><p>It's all her fault. Soul Steeler is dead and it is all her fault. If only she hadn't run. If only she had stayed, he would still be alive.<p>

And instead she is, once again, alone. Atem doesn't walk away from Soul Steeler's death. She flees from the continent and swears never to return. His scimitar points her that way.

She knows that she will one day, but it feels better if she can lie to herself, just this once.

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><p>Atem realizes something as she boards the ship to the New World. She realizes that she is the reason why the Bakuras are dying.<p>

It is a horrifying conclusion, almost as horrifying as when the gods shouted at her to return to her homeland not a day ago. But it makes sense, in a terrible way. They die because she walked into their lives.

Atem wonders if it is selfish of her to still want to find them. Because it is their appearances in her long and tiring life that has become her reason for living.

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><p>She lives amongst the spirits of her former people for a few years. Atem can't help them to pass on because they blame her for the fact that they are still here. She killed them, so she could never help them to release their guilt.<p>

Atem avoids her mother's grave, as she had all those years ago. She does find the collapsed remains of the throne room. Her father's bones still rest on the throne. She can see the indents of the knife between his ribs. Bakura did that. Bakura the King Killer.

She avoids the alter as well, the temple where it all started. She remembers how the blood had run down the stairs and into the streets. She remembers…she does not want to remember _that_. _That_ is dead and buried in her past. _It_ will not reach the surface again.

And she remembers the stone.

Atem finds his skeleton – Bakura's. It hasn't moved from its position, only sunk into the ground where she left it. The Lines are still etched into his bones, glowing red with his power. The Lines that would have killed him in the end.

She feels an emptiness in the core of her being, one she hadn't felt since _that day_, and cries.

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><p>When she finally picks herself together, she travels into the southern colonies of the European nations. There she discovers the slave trade.<p>

Or rather, what is disguised as the slave trade.

She has never liked the idea of owning another person. Atem only bought Bakura to keep him away from the executioners. But this was even more sickening than what her people did. At least, the Mayans had the decency not to disguise one horrible thing as being a (granted, slightly less) horrible thing.

Atem remembers the factories where _those things_ were mass-produced. She sets one of her dragons loose in them and Ra burns it to the ground. She figures that giving the poor men and women inside death when they are already dying is better than what awaited them _there_.

She finds a boy, still alive in the wreckage. Atem contemplates killing him, as it is obvious that he was in the process of being converted. But she would be a hypocrite if she did, so she pulls him out and promises to return him to his family.

It takes her ten years, but eventually she does manage to track down Ricardo's parents. They worked in separate fields on separate farms. She sets fire to the plantations and escapes with the boy's family.

Atem Summons The Winged Dragon of Ra once more and sends them back to Africa. As the golden dragon flies off into the distance, she knows that she would have been a good mother.

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><p>The fifth Bakura is a child. The gods themselves call her to him. He is prematurely born, one hundred years to soon. But the gods say that he is needed now because <em>that thing<em> is expanding too quickly. The ultimate weapon isn't ready yet.

And Atem is to raise him to become soldier.

It terrifies her, both because of what she is doing – instead of teaching him to play games or count numbers, it is where to strike on a body to cause instant death – and what she feels. She is this boy's mother. Mother's don't love their children the way she does.

And then he starts to give her gifts.

The first gift she treasures: the comb that used to belong to his mother. And then the gifts become colourful rocks from the beaches or interesting shells. But soon, the rocks become jewelry that gets more and more expensive. She finally figures out where he's getting it from when she spots a bit of blood on a necklace.

He is the only Bakura that she runs from. She's created a monster that hunts her as much as he hunts _that thing_. He craves her and will stop at nothing to be with her.

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><p>Dark God dies for her. His magical core ruptures and he walks right into the heart of the enemy's base. They do not know what is happening until it is too late. It takes them centuries to recover.<p>

But Atem will never forget his last words to her.

"I am happy. Live, My Queen. Live for me."

It is not what he is saying that she remembers. It is how he said it. How ironic was it that Dark God would be at his sanest during his final minutes?

If it is any consolation, his last gift to her – red fire that scorched the skies – is beautiful.

She travels north, following the blade of his axe all the way there.

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><p><em>They<em> are devastated by the lost of the slave trades to South America. Truly and completely devastated. They slither into their last remaining outpost in the north. But from what she hears, the colonies there are planning a little rebellion of their own.

Atem feels like she has a chance for the first time in years. People are beginning to realize that _it_ is here and she isn't just fighting on her own anymore.

She makes her way up north into the British Empire's colonies and helps pick George Washington out of his low. She fights along side the blue coats, fellow Magicians casting spells along side her. Atem feels young and free and proud once again.

And when the revolution is over and The United States of America stands tall as the nation that threw _that thing_ out of their country, she stands just outside the room where the Constitution is signed and smiles.

Maybe she does have a chance after all.

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><p>She leaves America soon after the French call for support for their own revolution. Officially, America declines to send help, but unofficially sends her to fight. But when Atem finally meets with the rebels, a man named Maximilien Robespierre takes control of the government.<p>

Atem knows without even having to be informed that Robespierre is a last ditch attempt to get someone to control France. And she knows what to do.

She gets in contact with a small faction that still willing to fight.

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><p>The sixth Bakura finds her first and apparently he's been looking for her for a long time already.<p>

He nearly pounces on her when he discovers whom America sent to help, asking her all sorts of questions about magic and the past and her life in general. He admired her from his dreams and believed that she was the key to changing France for the better.

Atem is genuinely flattered.

Afterwards, he apologies for being so forward, hoping to fight with her someday in the field. He shakes her hand and walks away. Atem's jaw drops. He's so odd.

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><p>Akeifa dies in a hospital bed with her hand in his. It is not the way that either of the figured he would go.<p>

He asks her if the curse had not existed, if she would have said yes. Atem sighs sadly and nods. He says nothing, just smiles and stops breathing.

She tries everything to get his heart started again, but nothing works. Napoleon has to pry her from his cold dead corpse. Atem even considers doing _it_ again, but decides against it. She doesn't think the gods will as forgiving this time.

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><p>Atem stays and makes sure that Napoleon become Emperor of France, the first non-infected king in Europe since this all began. However, she is completely unprepared for him to want to free other countries as well. They argue about whether or not France has the resources to do so, but eventually he went out and did it anyways.<p>

He manages to liberate Spain again, after that idiot Christopher Columbus decided that it would be a good idea to bring back _that thing_ from her homeland. Napoleon's liberating hand turns towards several other countries before _they _finally get him.

He manages to get Atem out of the country before _they_ find her, but it is already too late for him. She was not the only one. He divorced his wife to keep her safe, claiming her to be barren so that she would be able to escape. Napoleon tried to keep the infection at bay, but it finally caught up with his during his second exile.

Atem hears of his death in Australia several months afterwards. She mourns him and knows that the resistance had lost one of its best leaders.

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><p>It is the Great War that brings Atem out of hiding. She's managed to hide for over a hundred years on this gods forsaken rock, living off of lizards and birds and other animals of the hunt. The Aboriginees of Australia have a name for her. Ironically, it is the same one that the people of North America gave her all those years ago.<p>

The Red Traveler. She doesn't think it's a co-incidence.

She realizes that instead of creating factories, _they_ are using the War to take what _they_ need. Atem sets out of Europe once more and influences the signing of the armistice. What she doesn't realize is that the terms were changed afterwards to the one's remembered by history today.

Atem curses _them_ with all the worst words she'd picked up over the years as she watches the world erupt into war once more. This time she's had enough.

She brings an end to it herself. Atem hunts down Adolf Hitler relentlessly. The man has to constantly move from safe house to safe house simply to avoid her. Eventually, she catches up to him in a bunker. She forces poison down his wife's throat and shoots Hitler in the head with Akeifa's revolver.

His body fades. Not dissolves, like a Magician would, but fades. Like something a Creator cooked up would die.

Adolf Hitler was never born. Someone, a Creator, invented him as a figurehead.

Somewhere in her heart, Atem knows exactly who it was that did this. But it doesn't make any sense. Even if Dartz was brought back to life, there would be no way that anyone could heal what she did to him. There wasn't much of a body left for his soul to be reattached to.

It just wasn't possible for him to be back. Ancients don't have that kind of power.

No mortal or immortal being on earth has that kind of power.

* * *

><p>After the Second World War is over, Atem travels back to the United States. She remembers the words of the founding fathers – "You will always be welcome here" – and goes straight to the nations capital to arrange a meeting with the President to discuss the atomic 'bomb.'<p>

She teleported straight into his office and held him at knife point, making President Truman swear to never use Magicians as suicidal kamikaze's ever again. She tells him that George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and all the other famous American fathers would be ashamed of their country's usage of the people who had helped them to fight of _them_.

He swears, but it is the beginning of the rocky relationship the Presidents had with Atem during her years in the States.

* * *

><p>Atem is there, purely by coincidence, when John F. Kennedy is shot. She doesn't know what happened until several minutes afterwards, but knows that something is wrong.<p>

She later becomes the shoulder that Jackie Kennedy cries on. Though she never really liked the woman – she liked roses too much for her taste – Atem tries her best to comfort the grieving woman, whispering "I'll get the man who did this to him."

Atem gives the same courtesy to Bobby Kennedy's wife when he is killed, though the woman tells her that the justice system will take care of everything. She doesn't know which wife is stronger: the one agreeing to a hit job or the one refusing it.

Instead, Ethel Kennedy tells her to lay low for a while in the Rocky Mountains. She does just that for a few decades and thinks about all the people she's seen live and die. But Akeifa's revolver continues to point south so she leaves Canada and returns to the States.

* * *

><p>Atem remembers the day that she finds Seto and Mokuba Kaiba. It's one of the few things that are still imprinted in her mind. It is September 2nd, 1999. She is passing by an orphanage when a small boy with black hair and eyes not blue enough to contain magic rushes out and latches onto her arm screaming, "Adopt us!" at the top of his lungs.<p>

His brother catches up to him and grabs her by the collar of her shirt, dragging her down to his level and repeats the message.

Atem thinks that she likes these boys and agrees. They obviously weren't expecting that answer because they think that she's joking at first. But she jerks her head in the direction that she's going in already in a way that says, "Are you coming or not? I haven't got all day." They follow her out of their old life and into their new one.

She finds out later that she technically kidnapped them, as she never signed the paperwork to become their parents. It doesn't matter. She doesn't know how to read or write English anyways.

* * *

><p>Two years and nine days later, Atem becomes outrageously glad that she took those two with her as she watches the long reign of freedom in America come to an end.<p>

_They've_ come. And now, _they've_ sent American soldiers into the middle of the worse infected place on the planet. There is no safe place to hide. But she's come prepared.

The gods had already given her one soldier to train from infancy. Now, she has two. And the Kaiba brothers are ready and willing.

* * *

><p>It is the year 2007 when she realizes that it has been over two hundred years since Akeifa died. Over the limit of years. It is over. He isn't coming back.<p>

Seto finds her sitting against a tree staring at all the weapons she has collected over the years. He asks her what was wrong. She tells him a very long story about a pointed stick and a woman with nothing to loose.

"_Immortality is to live your life doing good things, and leaving your mark behind."  
>- Brandon Lee<em>

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><p><strong>Hello!<strong>

**So this is first post from my university dorm. It's kind of exciting. I can't wait for classes to start.**

**I've had a few plot ideas on the brain for the past few weeks. One, of course, is the newest chapter to The Others (and yes, it is in the making). The other one, aside from this, is one for Marik. It kind of fell through, but I'll pick it up eventually.**

**So, instead of posting a time line on the forum, I decided to write this. I think it turned out alright. They're just little snippets from Atem's life after the Cut Off, covering the major events that took place in her long life. It sad, but there are some happy moments in there. Once again, I am waiting in anticipation for The First Year to end so that I can begin writing Resurrection and The Second Year.**

**If you have a question, comment, or concern, you can contact me via the forum, a review, or a PM. I love hearing from you guys.**

**Until next time,**

**AlcatrazOutpatient**


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